Joy in Pakistan

I have lived in London for a large part of my life, as a child, as a student and now as a young adult trying to build a career. I’ve always held the desire to remain in Pakistan, or to return were I to leave it, with a view to ultimately living out my life within it.

I would sometimes express this view to elders within my immediate circle, usually following the “So Beta, what do you want to be?” question. Given that there was a real enough prospect of becoming an expatriate, the earnest desire to remain in Pakistan would usually draw one of two responses, namely:

1. a raised eyebrow in mild surprise (pleasant or otherwise), or;
2. a cynical “We’ll see how you feel in a few years”. A bit like how one might dismiss a five-year boy old when he express his complete disdain for girls, citing pink as an unambiguous example of lameness.

Common to both responses was the underlying notion, that in objective terms, a life overseas was more promising in terms of prosperity, security and comfort, compared to a life in Pakistan.

Considering the question dispassionately, it is hard to argue otherwise. By every measure that is actually measured in developmental terms, Pakistan lags behind. The average Pakistani is less educated and poorer, less safe in terms of crime, less secure in his (and especially her) political and economic rights. Our access to energy is intermittent, our supply of water is tenuous and our healthcare system is overburdened and sometimes prohibitively expensive. Our justice system can be described as selectively functional at best, or generally dysfunctional at worst.

Those are the somewhat measurable commodities. But within the (admittedly flawed) juxtaposition of Pakistan vs ‘The Expatriate Existence (entailing the far east, the middle east, or the West depending upon your good fortune), I would argue that there is a discernable advantage to living in Pakistan, as part of Pakistani society. For the purposes of this post though, I will keep my comparison between the UK and Pakistan as I am familiar with both countries.

Hiding Truth in Bullshit

I do notice that when people start to make the point im about to make, they tend to focus on really superficial, sometimes untrue caricatures like:

• “Yaar, on the Tube, no one talks to each other” (True but superficial)

• “Yaar if you fall down on the street people don’t help you up” (This of course is complete bullshit, in London people help you on the street no questions asked)

• “Yaar, in the UK or US, you will always be a second class citizen” Once again, a statement that strives to be a truism, whilst actually being complete Uppercase Shite. Of course you can be treated like a 2nd class citizen in the UK, but there are a hell of a lot of people in Pakistan who are treated like 2nd class citizens all-the-friggin-time. When was the last time you heard of servants eating from the same cutlery as their sahibs or begum-sahibs? Or the driver coming inside the restaurants to share a meal with his Sahib’s family? Let us at least concede that such instances are rare.

Bullshit notwithstanding, there is a genuine point lurking in the motivation behind some of the dumbass examples listed above. Pakistanis have a sense of wider community that is substantially less pronounced in the UK. We not only have larger and tighter knit nuclear families, we tend to live amongst our extended families and socialise within an extended circle of inter-married, inter related people.

Conversely, that familiar rant against materialism, wherein the objects in our lives replace the people in our lives, has a grain of truth to it, at least from my experience of London. In the UK, the life plan of the average mid-20s man tends to follow a different structure from what you might expect from the average comparable desi.

Trainspotting

To illustrate what I mean, watch the following video and see whether the narrative fits neatly with the priorities of the average Pakistani of that age, or even the un-average Pakistani who is fortunate enough to choose whether or not to be an expat.



Sure, it’s not representative of English people. Given that it’s a monologue from a herionchi in a Danny Boyle flick, I’m hardly going to argue otherwise. But it is reflective, of something. It struck some nerve in the UK, didn’t it?

The Pakistani version of that speech might have read as follows:

Choose high grades and an education because of your family. Choose law or medicine or banking because of your family. Choose a girl or boy, from a good family, that fits with your family. Choose to live at home, with your parents (initially anyway). Choose to contribute to the household income. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home on rent. Choose your friends from childhood and a few new ones. Choose cotton Shalwar Kamizes and Shaadi Khana. Choose arguing with your parents and siblings on the weekends, every weekend, until you move out and when they move back in to yours. Choose mindless numbers of weddings, occasional ganas. Choose living life amidst your large, growing, consistently bickering, co-dependant and genuinely loving family. Choose less choice, more stress, more love.

Some Qualifications and Caveats for those already disagreeing

For those already disagreeing, let me say this: I know what you are thinking,and yes you are right.

There are therefore two important qualifications to my argument that anyone posting comments should endeavour to read and understand:

Qualification One: I appreciate that most of our readers are expatriates who are settled abroad (no doubt very happily, with families and communities of their own). Similarly, I accept that my own knowledge of either the UK or Pakistan is limited and specific to me. In that regard, the view I have presented is both a personal opinion and an argument in favour of a proposition. In other words, I would like to hear from people who have had a different experience or who generally disagree for their own reasons because that would help inform me.

Qualification Two: There is a second, more important qualification, namely that it is more often our commitment to our families that compels us to become expatriates in the first place, so the choice between ‘Desi community’ and ‘western independence’ is both an unaffordable luxury and a false choice. There are countless immigrants who hate living away from home, but who do it to earn for their families and provide them with better lives than they could possibly ever have had in Pakistan. I accept that this is true.

In that respect, it is not for me to argue against the benefits of living overseas (as I stressed in paragraph 5, they are undeniable). My point was to argue in favour of a positive aspect of Pakistan that I feel is not given its due weight in such decisions, and which could in many cases be a factor to tip the scales back in Pakistan’s favour, if duly considered.

Trading Up, not Down

Perhaps relationships matters more in Pakistan because things are so uncertain so often. In the absence of any welfare net, we create our own ‘social’ ‘security’ through our networks of family and friends and by continuously maintaining and building upon the bonds between us. But our ‘social safety nets’ aren’t just that. The strength and support they provide is less crucial than the sense of meaning that communities imbue life with. They therefore improve day-to-day quality of our lives in a way that is both real and hard to measure.

To say this is not to devalue independence. There are likely to be few families in Pakistan that manage to strike an ideal balance between individualism and community. But my point is that Pakistan strikes a better balance, that it works in a way that something is not working in the UK, that we are more fulfilled as people because of it. To some degeree, there is more warmth, and colour in our lives and in the lives of our elders and children, because we are perpetually surrounded in each other’s light.

Like everything, that comes with a price, and this post would be incomplete if it did not address the cost of Pakistan’s family values. ‘Community’ means that many of us feel overwhelmed by the total interference of our families in our personal affairs and the lack of respect for our personal space. To take another poor but somewhat reflective example, compare a queue at a ticket counter in London with a queue at a ticket counter in Karachi; sometimes it feels as though every trivial to important personal decision made in Pakistan is that crowded, that hassled. In that respect, community and societal opinion weighs down hard upon us. Very often it is both intellectually and emotionally stifling, and the weight of those pressures can stunt the personal growth of those who have been unable to wrest themselves from under it.

Community in that sense imposes a real burden. But I feel the ‘independence’ I encounter in Londoners entails a measure of isolation, an ultimately unhappy exchange of communal intimacy for privacy. And whilst there is an obvious balance to be maintained between the two, I know which I personally accord greater value to.

As an aside, community has also has a value in personal religious terms. And I speak of religion not in a mundane sawab-gunnah sort of way, but in terms of spiritual satisfaction, particularly if one of the primary objects of faith is to self-forget (and I would argue strongly that this is the case). Take Islam:

• When you pray you remember Allah (and forget yourself)
• When you perform Hajj you join the stream of like clad pilgrims (and forget yourself) and focus your mind towards God (and forget yourself further)
• When you give charity and fast to empathise with the poverty and hunger of the poor (you forget yourself)
  

In all of that, in all those activities, save for a substantial portion of prayer, our transcendence involves community. We cannot escape ourselves unless we are able to enter the hearts of our mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters.

And that for these reasons, despite everything, I would argue that in objective terms, the Pakistani experience is, in key ways, better and more fulfilling than the expatriate experience.

And commenters, before you proceed to completely rip me to shreds, please remember the caveats!